[Air-L] Book Announcement - Worried About the Wrong Things: Youth, Risk, and Opportunity in the Digital Age

[Jacqueline Vickery]

I'm excited to announce that my first book,* Worried About the Wrong
Things: Youth, Risk, and Opportunity in the Digital Age,
<air-l at listserv.aoir.org>* is now available (The MIT Press, 2017). It is
likely of interest to digital scholars, as well as to educators and
youth-serving organizations.

Many in the AoIR community have offered support and feedback along the way
and I thank you all for that and further look forward to hopefully thanking
some of you in person in Estonia.

Best,
- jacqueline


*​*Overview
It’s a familiar narrative in both real life and fiction, from news reports
to television storylines: a young person is bullied online, or targeted by
an online predator, or exposed to sexually explicit content. The
consequences are bleak; the young person is shunned, suicidal,
psychologically ruined. In this book, Jacqueline Ryan Vickery argues that
there are other urgent concerns about young people’s online experiences
besides porn, predators, and peers. We need to turn our attention to
inequitable opportunities for participation in a digital culture. Technical
and material obstacles prevent low-income and other marginalized young
people from the positive, community-building, and creative experiences that
are possible online.

Vickery explains that cautionary tales about online risk have shaped the
way we think about technology and youth. She analyzes the discourses of
risk in popular culture, journalism, and policy, and finds that harm-driven
expectations, based on a privileged perception of risk, enact control over
technology. Opportunity-driven expectations, on the other hand, based on
evidence and lived experience, produce discourses that acknowledge the
practices and agency of young people rather than seeing them as passive
victims who need to be protected.

Vickery first addresses how the discourses of risk regulate and control
technology, then turns to the online practices of youth at a low-income,
minority-majority Texas high school. She considers the participation gap
and the need for schools to teach digital literacies, privacy, and
different online learning ecologies. Finally, she shows that
opportunity-driven expectations can guide young people’s online experiences
in ways that balance protection and agency.
​

*​*

*Dr. Jacqueline Ryan **Vickery, Ph.D.*
Assistant Professor
Department of Media Arts <http://mediaarts.unt.edu/>
College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences
University of North Texas
@JacVick | http://jrvickery.com/ <http://jrvickery.com/>

*"Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world." - *
*Grace Paley*